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Friday, August 5, 2016

For the first time in a long time, here's something that I made just for me. It's an Unreal material for creating stylized custom planets. Everything - the continents, the water, and the clouds - are all contained inside one material.

This is probably the most sophisticated material I've made so far. It was a nice exercise as a sort of synthesis of a lot of different material techniques. This was also my first time generating and using flow maps (to control the clouds' movement), so now I can add that to my skill list as well.

The material is procedural and highly customizable.

You can use a height map to add a stronger relief, if you're going for an especially exaggerated look.

Tweak various colors and properties to your liking.

Or take it to the extreme to create an alien world.

And of course the shape of the continents and clouds can be changed simply by swapping in your own textures.

Saturday, January 2, 2016

This is an animated hypercube (a three-dimensional projection of a four-dimensional object) I was commissioned to do for a trailer for a mathematics book (I'll add a link here once the project is public).

This was a really interesting and weird project to do. I'd seen similar sorts of animated images before, so I had some idea of how to go about it. But making an object that can fold itself inside-out posed some problems.

Initially I tried putting it together using regular geometry, but the polygons would get twisted around themselves and make an ugly mess, so I had to switch to using NURBS. The tubes stay oriented with a ridiculous number of look-at constraints, and, thanks to the greater mathematical precision of NURBS, they keep their shape.

Building the rig was a fairly straightforward, if tedious, task. The needs of the rig were simple enough that I probably could have skipped using bones entirely, and just mapped everything to the Controllers directly. But this method was what I was more familiar with, and it helped me keep everything organized, both in the scene and in my head. Ultimately it worked out, and I don't think I would have saved all that much time doing it the other way.

Sunday, December 20, 2015

Here are some examples of the work I've been doing for Paranoid Productions. This has been my first time doing entirely hand-painted textures, and it has certainly been a challenge, but it's one I've enjoyed.

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

I just realized that I never actually posted this stuff on my blog. These are some early concept paintings I did for Junior year Pre-Production, as pitches for potential thesis projects. Neither of these got made, since I ended up switching to a different project over the summer, but they're both ideas I'd like to return to some day.

The first pitch was for a game called Chronomaton. It's a Lemmings-style puzzle game, where you have to control a group of robots through the inner workings of a giant clock.

Second is called Nimbus. This is a Strategy/God game in the style of Populous, where you play as an ancient weather god. The goal of the game is to gather followers and guide them to prosperity; you can reward those who follow you with bountiful harvests, and punish non-believers with droughts and storms. The conceit of this pitch was that you would get to see the village grow and advance over time, so I did to paintings of the same scene - one in an earlier, more primitive state, and the second in an advanced, thriving state.